Disney's 'Snow Woke' and the Dumbest 'DEI' Attack of All Time
It's time to stand up to racist trolls and say, 'F- you and the Cybertruck you rode in on'
On a crisp Halloween day in 2016, with hopes high and expectations through the roof, the Walt Disney Company announced it had started work on a new film project: a live-action adaptation of the company’s founding film classic, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
Although it was less than nine years ago, it’s hard to remember the innocence that enveloped the world on that autumn day. The American people were on the cusp of selecting Hillary Clinton as its first-ever female President to succeed Barack Obama in the White House (or so the entire world presumed). The country had a strong pandemic-prevention playbook in place, and Obama and other leaders empathized with the Black Lives Matter movement. The world delighted in using their phones to chase little cartoon characters in Pokémon Go.
For Hollywood, it seemed like the dawn of a new golden age. Game of Thrones ruled on television and had become the world’s common conversation. Disney dominated theaters as no studio ever had before with its big labels strategy. Six of the year’s top 10 films came from this one studio, led by the smash animated sequel, Finding Dory.
The company had hit upon the newfangled genre of live-action remakes of beloved Disney classics, a silver bullet to bring together audiences young and old all while renewing the relevance of the company’s classic IP. The remakes of Jungle Book, Cinderella and Maleficent had all been gargantuan successes, with Beauty and the Beast, Mulan and Aladdin in the works.
Turning to the company’s original princess was as easy a greenlight as you get in Hollywood. The announcement included a much sought-after screenwriter taking on duties and the songwriting team of Pasek and Paul, authors of the Dear Evan Hansen soundtrack and fresh off writing the lyrics for La La Land, committing to new songs to freshen up the “Whistle While You Work” originals. In the years that followed, up-from-indie-world director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) joined the project and the cast filled out with Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, joining as the Queen — and fresh off a sensational debut in West Side Story, Rachel Zegler taking the crown as the title character.
As the company pirouetted from success to success, it was another project destined for the pantheon.
Who could have imagined that it would be one of the most trouble-plagued, bedeviled projects Disney studios would ever touch?
Today, as the final product lurches and reels towards its big-screen bow on March 21, Snow White looms as a Hollywood case study of how the world can change under your feet. It approaches the finish line having collected more scandals, brouhahas and issues than some studios see in a decade. In this Beyond Thunderdome world we live in, Snow White reveals the terrible set of choices available to a studio that finds itself in the culture war crosshairs. And perhaps it’s time to call some of these attacks what they are: overt racism under the guise of the culture war.
To begin, in the event you haven’t been keeping tabs, here’s a partial — very partial — list of the flare-ups that have accrued to Snow White since that 2016 announcement:
‘DEI’ Princess
Snow White’s first great battle came with the casting of Zegler. It incited the predictable backlash from the dark and fetid corners of social media that Snow White, was in fact, white, objecting to the casting of a Latina actress in the iconic role.
For the record, Zegler is Colombian-raised of Polish background, and the real Snow White was, actually, a fictional character and therefore of no particular race or ethnicity, but who’s counting?